‘I can’t feed ‘em, and it breaks my heart:’ Nonprofit struggles as hunger in Boise surges
Among rising costs in housing and child care in the Boise area, affording food has become a concern for many Idahoans in the transition to a post-COVID-19 world.
Before the pandemic, the Idaho Foodbank was seeing numbers decrease for hunger in the state, specifically among children. When the pandemic hit, the numbers rose dramatically.
“It all jumped immediately. It was huge,” Jaime Hansen, director of programs & partnerships for the Idaho Foodbank, told the Idaho Statesman.
According to a food insecurity data map from Feeding America, the percentage of Ada County kids facing food and nutrition insecurity had gone down from 15.6% in 2015 to 8.7% in 2019. Following the pandemic, the number jumped to 11.3% in 2021.
Children’s summer meal programs minimize food insecurity
Summertime is usually the toughest on parents, who can no longer rely on schools to feed their kids during those three months of summer break. However, summer food service programs exist for children.
“This is a really critical service,” Hansen said. “When you think about the roughly 130,000 Idaho children that were eligible for free and reduced price lunches during the school year, that service ends once school ends, but their needs to have ready-to-eat food does not.”
The Boys & Girls Clubs Of Ada County, a club for children during out-of-school time, is one of the nonprofits participating in the Summer Food Service Program.
“There’s a lot of our families that struggle, and we have a lot of kids that, you know, will come up to me and ask for free food and or if they can have more lunch or whatever it may be,” said Tracy Yost, director of nutrition for the Boys & Girls Club.
The club’s summer meals program for 2022 began on Monday and will go through Aug. 5, offering free breakfast, lunch and supper to all kids ages 1 to 18. Adults may also purchase a meal for $1.
“What it means is we’ve got nutritious food going out into communities where the children may be lacking those kinds of resources, but it brings the service close to home, which is also an important aspect,” Hansen said.
According to Yost, this is the club’s fifth consecutive summer offering free meals. Their services continued to run even in summers when the COVID-19 pandemic forced closures throughout the state.
On Monday alone the club served lunches to over 275 children, including 40 non-club members, at Riverfront Park next to the club’s main site, the Moseley Center in Garden City.
The second day went similarly. At 11:30 p.m., children lined up to receive their free lunch bags and milk from club staff members, who had spent the morning preparing the day’s menu (yogurt parfaits and pretzels) at the center next door.
The kids, most around elementary school age, sat in groups around the sunny park and chatted animatedly with each other and accompanying staff members. Those who had been dropped off by their parents for the day were taking a lunch break from their club activities, while those visiting from neighboring areas sat and ate with family members.
On a typical day, the club makes about 1,600 meals in its kitchen, some which are distributed to other Boys & Girls Club sites and school-based sites. All meals are free to all children regardless of whether they belong to the club.
“We have ‘walkups’ that come from the apartments or from wherever around the neighborhood, and they’ll ride up on their bikes or they’ll come with their parents, and they can eat,” Yost said.
Meals at risk as Idaho returns to normalcy after pandemic
The majority of summer meal programs, including the one organized by the Boys & Girls Club, are federally funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and administered by the state, which allow nonprofits to receive reimbursements for the meals according to Hansen.
During summer 2021, a total of 2,069,107 meals were served to children and teens under Idaho’s summer food-service program. The reimbursement amount paid to sponsors across the state totaled to $7.38 million, according to the State Department of Education.
The amount awarded to each nonprofit involved in the program was determined by the following reimbursement rates: between $2.415 and $2.4625 per breakfast, $0.9975 and $1.02 per snack and $4.25 and $4.3175 per lunch and supper.
As a result of the funding, there are several state-specific rules the programs must follow. One rule requires those picking up lunches to stay and eat them at the location rather than taking them home.
“It’s for real food-safety reasons to make sure that the people that are coming to our meal service to get a free meal are in need and are going to eat that meal,” Yost said.
The eligibility of an area to offer free USDA-funded meals depends on whether “sites operate in areas where at least half of the children come from families with incomes at or below 185% of the Federal poverty level,” according to the USDA. For a family of four in Idaho, that would equal an income at or below $49,025 per year.
Based on these guidelines, the Boys & Girls Club did not receive permission to offer open meal services in Kuna this year.
“I can’t feed ‘em, and it just breaks my heart,” Yost said. “Just because [people] have two incomes doesn’t mean they’re not scraping by.”
As cities in Idaho have continued to grow throughout the past several years, more and more sites have lost their eligibility to operate as open sites. Garden City is now the only Boys & Girls Club site offering open summer feeding, with Meridian and Nampa sites offering meals only to club members.
Other sites that would normally be open to the public face a different obstacle: too few employees.
“I would have liked to operate them all as open feeding sites for the summer, and that was my original plan, but it takes quite a few more staff to run those operations, and I can’t find any employees,” Yost wrote to the Statesman. “I am operating this summer with about four staff short, so it’s definitely tough.”
On top of that, with the federal waivers enabling schools to provide their students with free school meals during the pandemic set to expire on June 30, the challenges faced by families with food insecurity in the summertime could extend through the whole year.
“Those waivers were really important the last few summers,” Hansen said.
Aside from offering free meals throughout the day, parents may also enroll their children in the club for $35 a week, where they can participate in educational and recreational activities from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Some school pantry partners to the Idaho Foodbank are open over the summer months, the Boys & Girls Club among them, with ready-to-eat meals for anyone. Their website offers a food map locator where anyone in the community can find a pantry nearest to them at idahofoodbank.org/getfood.
“That is extremely helpful because rent eats first,” Hansen said. “We need folks to take advantage of the resources that may be in their community.”
This story was originally published June 10, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
